Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The details of yesterday's shootings in Newtown, Connecticut were just starting to trickle in when my Facebook feed began to light up with posts from friends saying what they thought this story was really about. These sorted fairly clearly into a number of categories:

• It's really about the need for gun control.
• It's really about the need to allow responsible people to carry weapons to protect themselves and those around them.
• It's really about the state of mental health care.
• It's really about the need to be better parents to our kids.
• It's really about what we have become as a society.

I have seen other commentators opine as well that this is really about the need to put God back in our schools, although that particular one hasn't shown up on my Facebook feed. The Westboro Baptist Church apparently is going to picket the funerals, because it's really about tolerance of homosexuality in our country.
While each of these thoughts have their own argument behind them, and while I certainly have my opinions about the relative validity of those, I'd like to suggest that all of them are red herrings.

All of these theories help us (or at least those who believe them) feel better, because they all boil down to one message: this could have been prevented. And we desperately need to believe this could have been prevented, because otherwise this could happen again, and it could happen to us. If these theories are right, however, we can make the world safe and neat again, and sleep better at night.

In addition, we are drawn to stating what this story is "really about" because, frankly, we can't stand to really contemplate what this story is really about.

What this story is really about is that 27 people, 20 of them young children, were brutally murdered in a senseless act of violence that we will never truly understand.

We need to let ourselves sit with that reality and feel the feelings that go with it. Only then will we be ready to have reasonable discussions about what, if anything, can be done to stop it from happening again.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

I am a mental health professional, a former principal and teacher, and an expert in responding to school traumas. But today, more than anything, I am a mom. Like moms and dads and other human beings today, my feelings about the shootings in Connecticut are complex and painful.

I came home tonight wanting to hug my child, and struggling with what to say. I offer my words here (followed by some description of how he responded and why I said what I did) not because they are the only or even the best way to approach this horrible incident with children, but because they are a way, and we have to start somewhere.

Here's what I said:

I need to tell you about something that happened today. It's kind of scary, but I think you're probably going to hear about it so I wanted to tell you so you can understand it and ask questions if you want.

Today something really scary happened in a school in Connecticut. There was a teacher there, I think she taught 1st grade, and she had a grownup son who had a very bad sickness in his brain. His brain was making him think very weird things. And he decided he wanted to kill his mom. But unfortunately, when he went to kill his mom, he went to her classroom where she was teaching, and after he killed her he also killed a bunch of the kids. It was very sad and everybody is talking about it and very sad and scared.

Every kid and every parent is different, and every conversation like this happens in a specific context. In our case, my son is 7 years old. He and I have had very recent conversations about mental illness in the context of the work I do as a clinician in Community Mental Health, and the terminology "sickness in the brain" is how we've described that. Another kid might need a different or more thorough explanation.

Of course, my son did have a few things to say:

• Where's Connecticut?
• Was the sickness like a concussion, or like people who don't know what day it is or think things are true that aren't?
• I don't want to talk about it.

To this last comment, I said, "That's fine, but if you do want to talk about it, or you have questions, you know where I am."

So, why did I choose these particular things to tell my son? There is method to my madness:

I need to tell you about something that happened today. It's kind of scary, but I think you're probably going to hear about it so I wanted to tell you so you can understand it and ask questions if you want.

Kids need to know it's OK to be scared, and that you can be scared and still function and be in control. As adults, we model this and open the door to talk about emotions. Also, this opener tells him that his understanding and processing is important, in general and to me.

There was a teacher there, I think she taught 1st grade, and she had a grownup son who had a very bad sickness in his brain. His brain was making him think very weird things. And he decided he wanted to kill his mom.

This begins to point out how unusual and out of the ordinary this incident is. Kids don't know, as adults do, that this kind of violence is rare. But they do have a sense that a very bad brain disease and thinking weird things is rare. Also, the focus in this description is not on the children as targets. By giving the shootings some background and context, my son is less likely to think of this and think, "the bad guys are coming for me."

It was very sad and everybody is talking about it and very sad and scared.

Here, again, the door is open to the idea that everyone -- not just kids -- has feelings about things like this. Scared and sad are OK, as is talking about it. Telling him about this is not specifically to make him talk or to make him scared, but to include him. He is important.

I don't know what questions or comments my son will make in the days and weeks ahead. I know if he has something to say, he'll say it. We talk about these things at my house. Hard as it is, that's how it should be.

More guidance on talking to children about violence and trauma is available here.

Update: Since I wrote this yesterday, we have learned that the shooter's mother died before the shootings at the school, and was not a current teacher. My son hasn't asked about the details today, so I haven't had occasion to correct what I said yesterday, and I'm not going to unless he brings the topic up. If I had it to do over again, I would still say largely the same things, except adding that after he killed his mom, he went to the school where he used to go when he was little to kill people. Note that I would not say he went to kill kids. We don't know that, first of all, and second of all it adds an emphasis that is unnecessarily scary.

For the last six days, the man responsible for the bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people in Norway last July has been testifying at his trial. He admits that he was the person who carried out the attacks -- there is no question or controversy about that. This trial is being held to determine whether what he did was a crime and, if so, whether he was sane at the time he committed it.

The shooter's view is that this was not a crime. He has an elaborate and fairly paranoid political ideology which, he believes, justifies the attacks as part of a war against Muslims and multiculturalism. Since he was defending his people, he claims, this was not a crime. As far as I can tell, no one expects this argument to win the case.

The question of whether he is -- or was at the time of the attack -- sane is somewhat more complicated. There are two psychiatric reports in play. One says that the shooter has paranoid schizophrenia and was unaware of reality when he committed the crime. The other says that he is a narcissist, but he knew what he was doing and is responsible for his actions. The shooter, for his part, says he is sane.

This case points out some of the big problems with legal discussions of sanity. "Insanity" is a legal term, not a medical or psychiatric one. There are millions of people in the world at this very moment who have a disorder that is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) right along with paranoid schizophrenia, and they are legally sane. That is, they know right from wrong and can appreciate the consequences of their actions. In fact, there are millions of legally sane people with paranoid schizophrenia.

In fact, one of the mental disorders listed in the DSM is narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, both psychiatrists who have evaluated this man think he has a disorder. What they disagree about is which one, what type (personality disorders are considered to be in a different group or "Axis" from other mental disorders) and whether it impacted his ability to know right from wrong. (In another high profile case, the man who kidnapped and repeatedly raped Elizabeth Smart was found legally sane in part on the basis of a report that said he had narcissistic personality disorder as well.)

On an intuitive level, most of us have a sense that you can't be all there and do what this man did. You'd have to be "sick" or "crazy." But those aren't medical terms either. And obviously your view of right and wrong has to be pretty messed up to think this is OK. But most people who commit murder are legally sane, and most legally insane people don't commit murder.

Where is the line between wrong or bad or evil and insane? Where do messed up values and priorities cross the line into not responsible for your actions? I think that's a question that doesn't have an answer. We have legal standards, and we hope we'll know the difference when we see it.

In my next post, I'll take a look at the impact of the trial on the families of those who died. Stay tuned.

Depending on your politics and personal tastes, Keith Olbermann is a liberal pundit, a newsman, an overhyped sports reporter, a propagandist, the voice of the nation's conscience, or a traitor to his country.  Last evening, he added one title most can agree on -- unemployed.  Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann, announced on his show last night that he was leaving the network.  Rumors vary between him being fired and him leaving over a money dispute.  Last night's show was his last.

Olbermann had a decidedly and unashamedly liberal bent to his show.  He openly loathed Fox News, which he called "faux news," and particularly Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, who often took top honors on his "Worst Person in the World" feature.  Throughout the Bush administration, he ended his newscast by stating how many days it had been since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.  He was suspended last fall for violating the network's rules about political donations by reporters after he donated to three congressional campaigns, including Gabrielle Giffords. 

Even if you loved Olbermann's politics, there was plenty to squirm about in Olbermann's style.  He often used the same kind of "anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot" kind of rhetoric that he criticized in O'Reilly.  His segments with guest commentators often fit the formula:

• Introduce story by stating the facts intertwined with Olbermann's opinion
• Introduce guest
• Ask guest whether Olbermann's opinion is the only reasonable one, as he thinks
• In unlikely event guest disagrees, restate opinion as fact and wait for response

If you were looking for the news, the whole news, and nothing but the news, you didn't tune in to Countdown.

I'm writing about Keith Olbermann today, however, not because of my personal feelings about him leaving MSNBC or even about the show itself.  Keith Olbermann deserves a nod because of something absolutely unheard of which he did, on air, with great frequency.  Keith Olbermann apologized.

When you are as unabashedly partisan and fiery as Olbermann is, you wind up saying a lot of things that make people mad.  And certainly, Olbermann stood behind the majority of what he had to say nonetheless.  But every once in a while, Keith Olbermann had the good sense and the good grace to admit when he was wrong.  A terrific example occurred after Olbermann raised questions and spoke, in a way that some felt was offensive, about the rape accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  He later tweeted,

Rape has touched my family, directly and savagely, and if anybody thinks I have addressed it without full sensitivity, then that assessment is the one that counts, and I apologize.

Read that again, because you won't hear apologies like that from media people -- or from anyone else, really -- very often.  He doesn't say, "sorry if I offended you," or even, "sorry that I offended you," both of which imply that the problem is the offense taken and not what was said.  He says, "If I offended you then my words were offensive, and so I'm sorry."

Most recently, Olbermann delivered a passionate and, in my opinion, moving commentary the night of the shootings in Tucson on January 9th.  He discussed the current political climate but, unlike many other liberal commentators, he didn't put the blame on the right.  He said,

Vio­lence, or the threat of vio­lence, has no place in our Democ­racy, and I apol­o­gize for and repu­di­ate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inad­ver­tently encour­aged vio­lence. Because for what­ever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

So, why am I bringing this up on a blog about trauma and crisis response?  Because very often, after a major incident, the impulse of those in charge is to circle the wagons and vehemently deny any responsibility.  The result is that those affected, who are primed to be looking for someone to blame, have a reason to step up their blame of those in charge.  Few and far between are people in authority willing to say, "This shouldn't have happened, we didn't want for it to happen either, and we will be carefully reviewing everything to make sure it doesn't happen again," let alone, "We screwed up, and while we don't think this is entirely our fault, we are willing to take some of the blame.  We're sorry."

It's always easier to blame those who are upset then to take a good long look at yourself.  Failure to do so, however, often makes it worse.  Whatever you think of Keith Olbermann, his show, or his politics, I hope that, with his departure, we don't also lose his excellent example of how to apologize gracefully and sincerely for the mistakes we all make in this world.

The week since the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six people and injured an 12 in addition to Giffords, has been full of discussion about our political discourse.  On one side, we have people pointing to the fact that Sarah Palin's website had a map with gunsight graphics over several congressional districts -- including Giffords' -- during the campaign, and to political rhetoric like "2nd amendment solutions" and "lock and load" as being responsible.  On the other, we have people pointing out that the shooter was almost certainly seriously mentally ill.

What both sides have in common is the very human trait of seeking a reason for a traumatic incident.  Studies have shown that humans are hard-wired to see patterns and causation, and if there isn't any we tend to see it anyway.  From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  In order to survive in the wild, animals need to have very good and detailed information about what a threat looks like, how to know when it's coming, and how to avoid it.  Understanding that something can't be avoided is not very helpful.  So if there is any chance at all that there is a pattern, we will find it, but we're not great at knowing if there isn't one.

If you ask me (and you did, because you're reading my blog), the choice between blaming this on political rhetoric and blaming this on mental illness is a false dichotomy.  Yes, it seems extremely likely that the shooter is mentally ill.  I don't have enough information to know if he is so ill that he is not criminally responsible for what he did, but it would be ludicrous to suggest that his mental state did not play a part in this tragedy. 

At the same time, mental illness occurs in a context.  The delusions that people experience are influenced by the culture in which they live.  You can see this clearly if you imagine someone with a psychotic mental disorder, in some completely other time and/or place.  I doubt people in the middle ages thought the CIA was monitoring their thoughts through their dental work, and I'm guessing that few such people in Mongolia believe they are Jesus.

This man's delusions apparently centered around illiteracy, mind control, the constitution and the government.  Did he ever see Sarah Palin's graphic or listen to Sharon Angler speak?  I have no idea.  Did he hear the negative tone of current discourse about the government?  Almost certainly.  That is the context of our culture. 

That having been said, that doesn't mean that toning down the rhetoric would have prevented this particular person from killing people.  It might have prevented him from killing these particular people on this day.  And maybe it would have held off the violence for long enough for someone to recognize that he really needed help.  We don't know.  We can't know.  And we don't like that.

What do I take from all this?  As they say, the best we can do is the best we can do.  And whether you blame rhetoric or illness or both for this situation, it's clear we can do better with both.  Talking about armed rebellion and resistance with regards to public figures is not OK, whether it caused this or not.  It adds to a culture that devalues those with whom we disagree, and that can't be good for us, with or without this instance.  And there are hundreds or thousands of severely mentally ill people who don't get decent help and, as in this case, sometimes don't even get noticed, because of the stigma associated with their disorders and the devaluing of its treatment in our society.  That isn't just bad for them.  As we learned this week, it's bad for everyone.  We can do better. 

And if I'm wrong, and neither of these things are at fault, and I'm just seeing patterns where there aren't any, I think our society will benefit from fixing them anyway.  It's certainly worth a try.

Tomorrow:  What pulled at our heartstrings in the Tucson coverage, and why

You don't have to be a fan of Speaker John Boehner to appreciate that he got it exactly right today when he reacted to the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in which six others, including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and a child, were killed and Giffords was critically wounded.

An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.

Eighteen additional people were injured in the shooting, which occurred outside a grocery store in Tucson during a public event hosted by Giffords.  The alleged shooter is a 22-year-old man who, in various social media, talks about himself as the "mind controller" and lists Mein Kampf andThe Communist Manifesto among his favorite books.

I'm not from Arizona and, like many Americans, I knew nothing about Rep. Giffords before today's attack.  Yet the story grabbed my -- and the country's -- attention almost instantly.  If it were just me we could chalk it up to the subject matter of my blog.  After all, my family no longer says, "Did you hear this horrible news?" when something bad happens.  They say, "Do you need a blog topic?"  But it isn't just me.  As I write this than four and a half hours after the shooting, Google News is listing nearly 4,000 news articles online about this event.

To me, this raises two questions of the sort where you think you know the answer until you try to articulate it.  The first is, why do we care about the shooting of someone we've never heard of?  The second is, if we have a reason to care, why do we focus on the fact that Rep. Giffords was shot and not on the death of another public servant, Judge Roll?

The answer to the first question, I think, goes back to Speaker Boehner's remarks.  Understandably, he feels a personal connection when someone targets a member of Congress.  By the same token, we as citizens feel a personal connection because, as the title suggests, congressional representatives represent us. They are our voice in government, whether we love them or hate them.  When someone attacks a member of Congress, we know on a gut level that they are attacking the people that person represents, or at least the people who voted for them.  Whether we ever heard of Gabby Giffords before today or not, the position she holds makes us assign particular and personal significance to her shooting, what it means to us as individuals, and what it means to our system of government.

That having been said, what about Judge Roll?  He was a public servant.  His job was to ensure equal and fair protection of the law for all.  He had received death threats over a recent immigration case, and surely we should worry for our system of government if judges cannot rule without worrying about their lives.  Why aren't we focused on him?

I think there are a couple of reasons.  First of all, eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that Giffords was the first one shot and the original intended target.  In the chaos that followed, she was the only person shot whom everyone knew had been shot.  The news of Judge Roll's death came several hours later, and the story had already been "branded" as being about Giffords.

Still, I suspect that even if Roll had been the target and Giffords had not been there, this would not be as big of a news story.  And I think that's largely because your average person on the street doesn't have a very clear idea of what a District Court judge does.  We understand judges in general, and we understand Supreme Court justices, but we don't have a good mental image of the importance of mid-level federal judges and their day-to-day impact.  We also don't elect federal judges, so we don't feel the connection that we do to members of Congress.  No one out there is thinking, "I know who John Roll is.  He's my judge."

Intellectually, I think that we should care very much about the assassination of Judge Roll, at least as much as the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords.  But reactions to traumatic events are not about what we think, they're about what we feel in that fleeting moment before our thinking brain takes over. So my gut is focused on Rep. Giffords and her family.  My brain, and the heart that sometimes follows it, also expresses horror and condolences to the family of Judge Roll and the other five people who died in Tucson today.

A driver for Hartford Distributors, a beer distributor in Manchester, Connecticut, opened fire in the warehouse this morning around 7 AM.  He killed 8 people and wounded two others.  Police responded, and as they closed in on the gunman, he killed himself.  That much, everyone agrees on.  I think most if not all of us would also agree that, regardless of his motives, this kind of violence cannot be justified.

This story is not nearly as clean as that storyline would appear, however.  The driver had just been in a disciplinary hearing in which he was shown a video allegedly depicting him stealing from a company truck.  He was given the choice to resign or be fired, and he chose to resign.  He began shooting essentially as soon as the meeting was over.

As if that weren't complicating enough, the shooter was allegedly being harassed by coworkers because of his race.  He was one of two African-American employees, and his family says he showed them pictures of racial epithets and a stick figure being hung by a noose, taken in the company restroom.  He also reported being referred to by the "N word."  After he shot the other employees but before he killed himself, he reportedly called his mother and told her "I shot the five racists."  Then he shot himself.

This situation is messy on many levels, and messy situations have a lot of impact and need a careful response.  In this instance, I imagine the following groups need support:

• the survivors, who have experienced believing they were going to die
  
• the families of the dead, who have lost a loved one violently and suddenly
  
• the families of the survivors, who will have lasting fears for their loved ones' safety
  
• the family of the gunman, who must come to terms with what he did and grapple with the two disparate versions -- that he was being fired for misconduct and/or that he was the victim of racial harassment
  
• the administration of the company, who have lost employees "on their watch" and may feel guilt, either because they fired the gunman or because they didn't respond appropriately to harassment complaints
• the union, which would have represented him in the meeting this morning and which may have had harassment reported to them
• anyone who actually harassed the gunman, who may now feel responsible (or may now feel his actions prove them "right" in their racism)

That's a lot of groups, and what makes it even trickier is that they are all going to need intervention and support separately.  You can't very well put the families of the victims and the family of the gunman together in a room to talk about how they're feeling, at least not if you want it to be productive, let alone healing. 

Add to this the fact that there are likely to be one or more lawsuits flying in various directions, and everyone knows it.  This means that anyone who feels guilty -- whether it's their fault or not -- is going to be pretty uncomfortable talking about those feelings for fear that what they say winds up in court. 

I hope this workplace has access to a good crisis response team of some kind.  I hope that team has an excellent coordinator.  They're going to need to assign people carefully and make sure they have enough to cover all the bases, because no one in this situation is going to be able to support more than one group, and in some cases perhaps only one individual.  They sure have their work cut out for them.

A 52-year-old taxi driver in Cumbria, England, shot and killed his twin brother, the family lawyer and 10 other people, wounded 25, and finally killed himself yesterday in a rampage that lasted almost three hours.  News reports say that the gunman was upset about what he perceived as an unfair distribution of his father's estate and sure that his brother and the attorney were conspiring to do the same with his mother's.  In addition to his brother and the lawyer, he shot at fellow cabbies and drove down the street shooting at random strangers.

This is a horrible incident in any country.  A lot of the questions being raised in the British press are the same ones we would expect if this happened in the United States:  Were there warning signs missed?  Why did it take police so long to catch him?  As is natural after an incident like this, people are searching for someone to blame, because they need some way to reassure themselves that this sort of violence can be stopped.  Who knows, maybe this could have been.

One question that is coming up rather prominently is a little different than you would expect in the United States, however.  How did he get the guns?  The United Kingdom has notoriously strict gun control laws.  Even police officers are not automatically given permission to carry firearms, and most of them don't.  In order to get a permit for a gun, you have to have a legitimate reason (self defense is not considered a legitimate reason), a letter from your doctor, two character witnesses, not have been imprisoned for three years or more, have a face to face interview and have a personal inspection of where you are going to keep the gun.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with a local journalist about the question of where the guns came from.  Towards the end of the interview, the questions turned to  the provenance of the guns.  She said that police would be investigating whether the shooter was licensed to have a gun, and that "if he wasn't, that will be very bad."
Can you imagine someone saying that in the United States -- that it would be very bad to learn that a shooter didn't have a permit for a gun?  I doubt it.  We are used to the idea that people who are not supposed to have firearms have them anyway.

When this journalist says that finding out the shooter didn't have a permit would be "very bad," she's not talking about it being bad for the police or the government.  She's not talking about it looking bad.  What she's saying is that finding out that this man could get a gun illegally would mean that others can get them too.  That would be dangerous, and it would represent a complete shift in how Britons think about gun violence in their country.  In England, you don't generally worry that everybody is packing heat.  If this shooter could get a gun, it would mean that things are a lot more dangerous than they thought they were.  It would be very bad.

We all live with the knowledge that we are in a certain amount of danger.  If you live in a war zone, you make your peace somehow with that so you can sleep at night.  If you live in the United States in a relatively quiet town, the amount of danger you have to make your peace with is much less, but it's not zero.  If you live in Cumbria, England, there are various ways you could be subjected to violence or sudden injury or death, but being shot, until yesterday, was not something you had to worry about a whole lot.  Today, they're very worried. 

The good news, such as it is, is that it turns out the shooter did indeed have a license for his guns.  On the one hand, that means that a potential mass murderer was licensed, which increases the calculation of the odds that someone else is out there, licensed and ready to crack.  On the other hand, it also means that there isn't a hole in the wall keeping guns out of everybody's hands, and so maybe the people of Cumbria, at some point, will be able to return to not worrying about it quite so much.

By now you've probably heard about the murder of four uniformed Lakewood, Washington police officers in a coffee shop yesterday morning.  There seems to be no doubt that the victims were targeted because they were police officers.  Police have a suspect and have been trying to find him in a series of very visible but unsuccessful attempts today.

A lot has been, will be, and should be written about these courageous men and women and their surviving families, including nine children.  The spontaneous outpouring of grief and support is amazing.  The owner of the coffee shop chain where the shootings occurred is an ex-cop himself, and he said yesterday that since his employees were unhurt he was mostly concerned for the families.  Who can blame him?

But the fact of the matter is that there were a handful of other people in the coffee shop when the shootings occurred yesterday -- both staff and patrons.  Police have said that it took some time to get full statements from them because it was so hard for them to describe what they saw right away.  Who can blame them, either?

It is not uncommon for survivors of shootings, particularly shootings in which multiple people are killed, to feel survivor's guilt.  They wonder why they lived when others died.  They feel that if only they had done more, they might have saved others.  Most often, they find some solace in the knowledge that everyone there was a target, and had they done anything different they might well be among the dead.

This situation is a little different.  The other patrons were not, in fact, targets themselves.  It seems pretty clear that the gunman was looking to shoot cops.  It is not as simple as realizing that they had to save themselves.  But in fact, they did have to save themselves.  While they may not have been targets to begin with, had they confronted the gunman they undoubtedly would have become targets.

When all is said and done, however, four police officers are dead in a highly publicized and sensational shooting that is making the national news, and the only people in any kind of position to stop it, one might argue, were the staff and other patrons.  While we all know that we don't blame them and we don't think they could have stopped this, that probably isn't how they are feeling.  That kind of guilt can lead to isolating oneself, and that's a very bad thing to do after a traumatic incident.

Add to this the wrinkle that the gunman is still out there.  The survivors have to be concerned, at least on a gut level, for their own safety.  They are witnesses, and he clearly doesn't care much about human life.  It has to be hard to get up and go out in public under these circumstances.

Most police departments have supports in place for families of officers killed in the line of duty and also for other officers and their families who understandably have renewed fears for other officers' safety.  Fewer communities are really set up to support the civilian survivors of an incident like this.  This is a time when a community-based CISM team is critical.  I hope there is one out there, or that someone asks for one on those people's behalf.  They need our support, too.

Update:  The suspect in these murders was shot and killed by police on December 1.  Hopefully, that will alleviate some small amount of the stress the survivors are experiencing.

He had compassion fatigue. He was a Muslim. He had money problems. He was depressed. He was disgruntled. He didn't want to deploy. He was a terrorist. He was harassed. He faced discrimination. He hated his boss. He was turned down for unemployment. He blamed the company. He blamed the army. He should have been stopped.

Today, as America reels from the second mass shooting in as many days, the blogosphere and the traditional media are lighting up with commentary on why the shooters in the Fort Hood and Orlando killings did what they did. If you google the stories, you find headline after headline with various speculation about motive, interspersed with the occasional article referring to the motives in each shooting as a "mystery."

Human beings don't like uncertainty, as I discussed yesterday. And the media doesn't like to report anything nuanced, and certainly not "we don't know." Where's the human interest in that? So we look for answers, and sometimes the answers we come up with sound good . . . until you think about them.

The shooter at Fort Hood is a psychiatrist. He had treated many people who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now there is speculation that this experience caused him to be traumatized himself, and in turn caused yesterday's shootings. No sooner had that theory hit the airwaves then we had articles arguing the opposite -- that PTSD is not contagious, and we are just making excuses.

The truth is, PTSD is indeed contagious, in a documented phenomenon called "compassion fatigue" or sometimes secondary or vicarious traumatization. People who work with the traumatized are susceptible to symptoms of trauma themselves -- this is a documented phenomenon and there are documented ways to try to prevent it. But as much as compassion fatigue is a real thing, most people who have it don't shoot people. Saying that is the cause is much too simplistic.

The shooter is also Muslim, true. And yet, most people who are Muslim don't shoot people either. And if mass shootings are caused by being Muslim, how do we account for the Orlando shooter, who certainly wasn't, or the perpetrator in the Pittsburgh gym shootings, or at Virginia Tech, or Columbine? Why is the Fort Hood shooting "terrorism" and those are horrible violent crime?

In Orlando, the shooter almost certainly was a disgruntled former employee with money problems. This is all true. But how many thousands of people fit that description, and never hurt a fly? How many hurt themselves but not others? How do you know who is who and which is which. Unfortunately, you don't.

There is a lot of commentary today suggesting that we as a country are hesitant to admit the "truth" about Fort Hood, and I think they are right. But that truth isn't that the shooter was a Muslim terrorist. That truth is that we just don't know. We may someday, or we may not. And if we don't know, we can't know it won't happen again, and that scares us.

We want to think that if we exclude certain ethnicities or nationalities or religions from our lives, we will prevent the next shooting from happening to us. We want to believe that if we know the Fort Hood shooter was a terrorist, we can protect ourselves by staying away from terrorists. But in Orlando, we discovered that that isn't true either. And that scares us more, so we pretend there's no inconsistency there, no nuance. It seems we'd rather live with our bigotry in this country than with our fear of what is random.